FALLBROOK’S AVOCADO REPUTATION IS BIG TRIVIA TIDBIT

The date was July 18, 2005, when viewers first watched Alex Trebek read a question about Fallbrook.

“Holy guacamole!” read the $800 question from that night’s “Jeopardy!” broadcast, which aired around the time a then-teenager named Robert Chodola was graduating from Fallbrook High School. “Fallbrook, California, is known as this ‘Capital of the World.’”

On Feb. 3, 2010, when Fallbrook turned up again on the hit game show, the spotlight was once more on the town’s famous green fruit. “Food Festivals” for $200 read like this: “Make room for guacamole and head to Fallbrook, California, for its festival of this fruit.”

On Tuesday night, Fallbrook made its third “Jeopardy!” appearance, this time when Chodola, now a 25-year-old graduate student, appeared as a contestant and informed the audience that his hometown remains the Avocado Capital of the World.

“I’d say it was definitely a lifelong dream,” Chodola told me on Wednesday, the morning after his episode aired. “Since high school, I’ve done trivia competitions and academic teams — I just have lots of good memories associated with competitive trivia, and ‘Jeopardy!’ is sort of the top.”

Call it a family tradition, he explained: “We’ll watch together and see who can answer first. We even have this game for Final Jeopardy — once we see the category … we try to guess what the answer is. We’ve gotten it right once or twice.”

Chodola applied to be a contestant a full year ago, in January 2012. Two online quizzes, one live audition and a dry run later, he showed up to the Culver City studio on Oct. 24 for his half-hour onstage with Alex Trebek.

(As a side note, he told me, “When you watch the show, the interaction you see between the contestants and Alex Trebek, that’s pretty much the extent of it.”)

It wasn’t his first brush with “Jeopardy!” As a history student at UC San Diego, he had tried to get on the show, but did not advance beyond the audition.

With a broadcast finally under his belt, Chodola knows the secrets.

“A lot of it is just having a good memory,” he said. “If you’re into trivia … the more experience you have, the more knowledge you amass. One of the tricks I do, watching the show, is read ahead and think of the first answer that comes to my head.”

At the moment, Chodola is pursuing his teaching credential at UC Irvine, but he still calls Fallbrook home.

He admitted to being nervous during the audition last summer, “but at the show itself, the contestant coordinators are really good at making you feel comfortable and laid back, excited for what you’re doing. Once I was up there, I wasn’t nervous at all. I think they work really hard to make sure people aren’t nervous.”

During Chodola’s game, the other contestants were a woman from Washington, D.C., and the repeat winner, who came into the episode with something like $80,000 from the four previous nights.

“I probably knew about 80 percent of the questions, but I just had trouble getting on the buzzer,” he told me. “There’s sort of this threshold — once you’re there, you’re definitely with a group of your peers. Everyone knows a lot about everything. Most of the time, everyone knows the answer; it’s just who gets to the buzzer at the right time.”

While the episode was airing, and all through the next day, Chodola’s Facebook page was being peppered with notes from friends. I can’t help but wonder how many North County folks who were marginally interested in Tuesday’s broadcast sat up when they heard the word “Fallbrook” come out of Trebek’s mouth.

“In the second round, lucky for me, there was a category on art history,” Chodola said. “I took art history in high school, I love the subject, and I minored in it in college. So I got three out of the five questions in that category — that was cool.”

He also buzzed in first to an early question in the category of recent best-sellers.

The book in question was “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the racy novel by E.L. James, and to his chagrin, Chodola had the answer. The whole world saw him roll his eyes in embarrassment.

As the episode drew to a close, Chodola’s chances weren’t looking good. Final Jeopardy! brought a topic he didn’t know so much about — meteorology — and his coin count lagged.

He would finish third.

“Going into Final Jeopardy I knew I wasn’t going to win, but I was just happy to participate,” he told me. “I took the online test because people were always telling me, ‘You should be on ‘Jeopardy!’ You should try out.’

“I said, ‘I’ll just do it, and if anything comes of it, great, but if not, that’s fine, too.’”